The Personal and the Political in Roger Scruton's Conservatism

Roger Scruton's philosophical enterprise is an effort to “save the appearances” of value in the human world that elude scientific explanation. The meaning of the human things appears only to a first-person perspective, which is incommensurable with the objective perspective of cause and effect. To make sense of our experience requires a “cognitive dualism” that can account for the human or “lifeworld” as well as physical reality. Ranging rather indiscriminately over Scruton's diverse writings, I expound the unifying conception of personhood that makes them a coherent whole and also serves as the touchstone for Scruton's conservative critique of liberal theory and practice. Some questions are raised about that two-dimensional critique, about its separation into “metaphysical” and “empirical” components, and about whether the latter does or doesn't “operationalize” the former.